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Can Anyone Be This Incompetent?

RUSH: I mentioned in the first hour of the program, ladies and gentlemen, that the back end of HealthCare.gov still doesn't exist. Here are the details. This from Fox News: "Much emphasis has been placed on enrollment stats as [Obamacare]'s inaugural open enrollment period comes to an end. But there's a key function on the federal exchange that remains inactive:

"The mechanism to reconcile payments between the government and insurance companies. This 'back-end mechanism' has been missing for the entirety of open enrollment period, which launched Oct.1, meaning insurance companies have had to manually bill the government for subsidies and cost-sharing plans, a procedure that's being dubbed an administrative nightmare."

They don't have the personnel for it. It's supposed to be automated. This is part of any website that sells anything. The back end records the sale to the seller so the seller can begin the fulfillment process and the collection process, and that doesn't exist. It's unbelievable. It would be like if you went to Amazon to buy something, and you clicked "submit" when your order was done, and you thought it went.

But that's where it stopped, because Amazon doesn't go any further than you clicking "submit." It doesn't have a record of you clicking "submit," and it doesn't have any way of fulfilling your order and it doesn't have any way of collecting your payment. So you sit there, and you wait for your delivery, and it doesn't come.

But you think you've paid for it. And after a couple of days go by when it hasn't shown up, you call and you're all out of whack because you've paid for it. They say, "We don't have any record of your purchase." That's where people are who have purchased health care via the federal exchange HealthCare.gov.

Now, the problem, aside from the obvious is this: Insurance companies are threatening to pull out of Obamacare if this back end isn't fixed because they aren't being paid. The last line here, the last paragraph illustrates why the insurance companies might back out. "Bob Laszewski, author of the Health Care Marketplace and Policy Blog, says the missing payment mechanism is contributing to the lack of clarity over enrollment numbers."

They don't know how many people have signed up, folks! They don't know how many people have signed up and they don't know how many have paid. They don't have any record of that at all. Here's a companion story before I get to this paragraph. This is from The Daily Caller: "Nearly 40% of Washington Obamacare Enrollees Haven't Paid." This is a state exchange, not HealthCare.gov.

They can't even blame the glitches on HealthCare.gov for their problem. This is the Washington state exchange where they can't even calculate that, and 40% have not paid. So now we know why the federal exchange claims they can't give out the numbers as to who has paid. It's because they don't want anybody to know just how bad things are. That's the real truth of this.

Sebelius said, "Well, yeah. We said seven million." Well, how many have signed up? "Well, the number's constantly in flux. It's a number that we can't give. It's not stagnant. The number's always moving. The number's always in flux. It's always changing. People are signing up new every second of the day. It's impossible give you a number."

They can't give us the number 'cause they don't know. "'I think most carriers would pull out of the program,' Laszewski says. 'Everyone believes this will be up and running in a month or two. If not, we will have an administrative nightmare. If I were an executive in a program, I would pull out -- you can't run your business'" this way. Meaning: An insurance company.

"'You don't know what the premium is, who you are covering.'" I don't know how to adequately describe for you what a disaster this is. The frightening thing is that this is intentional. The frightening thing... Nobody's gonna believe this, not the low-information crowd. The frightening thing is, this chaos -- this mountain of problems for the insurance companies -- is by design.

Because the ultimate aim of the Regime is to eliminate the insurance industry when it comes to insurance -- just wipe 'em out -- because they want single payer. They want everybody getting so frustrated that, at some point, that they throw up their hands and just agree to "simplify" everything by putting everybody on Medicare, which has its own bureaucratic nightmare to deal with.

There is no panacea or utopia.

There's no fix or solution.

Well, there is. That's not the right thing to say.

There is a fix, if you get the right tech people involved. If you get an honest system based on a specific set of goals, you could fix this fairly quickly. But it's because the Regime is just chock-full with people incompetent that don't know even what the objective here is, other than long-term objective single payer, but all of this mess in the way of getting there, it's an absolute disaster, and it just frosts me. I don't know what to do about this. No matter how bad the government screws anything up, it seems like the people of this country are always willing to let the government fix it.

It seems like the people of this country have the idea or the impression that government's better at running health care than doctors and hospitals and health professionals. That government's better at running the energy systems and programs of this country than the actual energy producers. I know part of the reason. The Democrat Party has succeeded in convincing people that the private sector operators are a bunch of cheats and liars and fraudsters who are trying to kill their customers, and the government cares. I understand that.

But at some point everybody who interacts with government in some way has got to realize it doesn't work. It doesn't do anything better than what takes place in the private sector. And yet, people continue to invest their hope and their confidence in the government to run things that, in this case, in the case of this administration, they don't have one person that's ever done anything successfully in the private sector.

So no back end on HealthCare.gov; no way of knowing who's enrolled; no way of knowing how many have paid. The insurance companies have no way of collecting. And they had three years to do this. That is what makes it tough for me to believe that this is simply and strictly incompetence.